June LSAT: The Morning Cometh

Hopefully, you’re still sleeping off the raging party you threw last night in celebration of/lamentation of taking the June 2016 LSAT. So, what do we know?

First off, it appears highly likely that section three was the experimental section. So, if you tanked that section, hooray! It’s a freebie! If you were hoping against hope that it was one of the other sections, you may end up disappointed.

Secondly, there was near universal moaning about the difficulty of the third Reading Comp passage — a little ditty about clay tablets. Who knew that clay tablets might stand between an aspiring lawyer and her hopes and dreams? LSAC, that’s who! Bastards.

Thirdly, the first Logical Reasoning section was described by many students as harder than normal, and certainly harder than the other scored Logical Reasoning section. It’s not unknown for the makers of the LSAT to do this, by which I mean punch you in the nose right out of the gate to shake your confidence. If you took this exam and are planning to take it again, this should have been an object lesson in the psychology of taking the LSAT. Getting hung up on performance earlier in the exam can only hurt you later on. It’s easy to say that from the safety and security of this blog, knowing that I’ll never have to take the LSAT again (don’t hit me), but it really is a point worth making. Unless you demand a score in the high 170s to a 180, the fact is that a lapse in performance on one section doesn’t necessarily translate into a losing score. Just tell yourself next time that it’s the experimental and move on.

A few other points: It seems that Games was maybe a little more focused on deductions than grinding it out. That, of course, is great if deducing is your thing, but not so great if you’re a grind it out workhorse. Also, it seems that Logical Reasoning was a little lighter on conditional diagramming than otherwise. Again, depending upon your strengths, this might be a good or bad thing.

If you have any other intelligence — or you want to brag or gripe or just chime in — please leave your comments below. Now…

It’s over, but where do we go from here?

If you feel like you may have done worse than you wanted, you may be thinking of canceling your score. We’ll have a post on whether you should do this and how to go about it later in the week. However, until then, watch this video of Blueprint founder Matt Riley discussing the thought process.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s just talk a little bit about what you should do. First, don’t do anything rash. You have a few days left to cancel your score and you should sleep on it, and not a passed-out-from-drinking sleep like you had last night. To the extent you can, just avoid thinking about it for the next few days. Hang out with the friends and family that you shunned for the past three months or more. Go outside. Get a tan. I mean, you look like Dracula.

Then, after you’ve righted yourself, do your best to determine how you did. There’s plenty of information out there on what this exam was like. The downside is that it’s all based on recall from people during a stressful point in their lives. The upside, however, is that by culling information that is confirmed by multiple sources, you can get a better idea of how you did. As mentioned above, a particularly disappointing section for you might have been the experimental. If others echo your finding that a particular section was very difficult, that might mean the curve is a little softer than you might have thought. You may even find that the cruddy way you did a game was actually the right way to do it, even if it didn’t feel so good.

Once you’ve done all that, let us know what you plan to do in the comments below.

9 Responses

In the first logical reasoning section there were a whole bunch of disagree questions too! If I remember correctly there were at leaSt 3 of them and maybe 4. There was also a crux question in the 5th section, which was good to see.

The scored sections are all of the same variety for everyone, but, on the experimental, some get Logical Reasoning, some Reading Comp, and some Logic Games. It appears that, this time around, section three fit that description.

I don’t even know where to begin … I was already nervous because I wasn’t PT’ing quite where I wanted to be, but figured if I could do really well on LG (usually my best section) then I would be okay. It just didn’t seem like the right choice to not actually go through with it …

Somehow LG turned out to be my worst section!! I couldn’t break open the games – sure I made a few deductions, and I tried doing scenarios, but it wasn’t clicking. When 5 minutes left was called, I had seen all the games but hadn’t answered half the questions. I just started skimming the section and putting answers down – “educated guesses” would be an overstatement. It was all downhill from there, and once I got to section 5 and realized that was the only LG section, I knew I was kind of done for …

I’ll sit on it another day or two days but I’ll probably cancel my score. Up next will be a break for summer, and then I’ll be back to studying this fall for the December or February test.